1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus and a printing method.
2. Related Art
A printing apparatus has been known which prints an image by ejecting liquid such as ink or the like from a head unit and landing droplets (dots) on a medium. As the printing apparatus, there is a printing apparatus which ejects photo-curable ink (for example, ultraviolet (UV) ink) which is cured when ink is irradiated with light, for example, UV rays, visible rays, or the like. In such a printing apparatus, after the UV ink is ejected onto the medium from nozzles, light is radiated to UV ink dots which are formed on the medium. Therefore, the UV ink dots are cured and are fixed on the medium (for example, refer to JP-A-2000-158793).
A method disclosed in JP-A-2000-158793 suppresses the generation of bleeding which occurs between UV ink dots by curing the UV ink dots which are ejected onto a medium using light, thereby easily forming an image with excellent image quality. However, even in this method, there are problems related to the color difference and/or the glossiness difference of the image. For example, in a so-called line head type printing apparatus which ejects ink from a plurality of head units which are in a row in the width direction of the medium, there is a case in which positions in which ink dots are landed on the medium are deviated due to the deviation of the arrangement of each head unit or the influence of meandering which occurs when the medium is transported. In this case, color difference and/or glossiness difference occurs by location in a printed image, thereby deteriorating image quality. In addition, such a problem is not limited to the case in which printing is performed using UV ink, and may occur in printing using normal ink (for example, general water-based ink or the like which is fixed to the medium by permeating therethrough).